Abraham Lincoln

Last speech April 11 1865

By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the
national authority-reconstruction-which has had a large
share of thought from the first, is pressed much more
closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great
difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent
nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with.
No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any
other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from,
disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small
additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ
among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of
reconstruction.

As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports
of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by
that to which I can not properly offer an answer. In spite
of this precaution, however, it comes to my knowledge that
I am much censured for some supposed agency in setting
up, and seeking to sustain, the new State Government of
Louisiana. In this I have done just so much as, and no
more than, the public knows. In the Annual Message of
December 1863 and accompanying Proclamation, I presented
a plan of re-construction (as the phrase goes) which, I
promised, if adopted by any State, should be acceptable to,
and sustained by, the Executive government of the nation.
I distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which
might possibly be acceptable; and I also distinctly protested
that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether
members should be admitted to seats in Congress from
such States. This plan was, in advance, submitted to the
then Cabinet, and distinctly approved by every member of
It. . . . The Message went to Congress, and I received
many commendations of the plan, written and verbal; and
not a single objection to it, from any professed
emancipationist, came to my knowledge, until after the news reached
Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to
move in accordance with it. .

I have been shown a letter on this subject, supposed
to be an able one, in which the writer expresses regret
that my mind has not seemed to be definitely fixed on the
question whether the seceded States, so called, are in the
Union or out of it. It would perhaps, add astonishment to
his regret, were he to learn that since I have found
professed Union men endeavoring to make that question, I
have purposely forborne any public expression upon it. As
appears to me that question has not been, nor yet is, a
practically material one, and that any discussion of it,
while it thus remains practically immaterial, could have no
effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our
friends. As yet, whatever it may hereafter become, that
question is bad, as the basis of a controversy, and good
for nothing at all-a merely pernicious abstraction.

We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out
of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that
the sole object of the government, civil and military, in
regard to those States is to again get them into that proper
practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in
fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even
considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union,
than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would
be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.
Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the
proper practical relations between these states and the
Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own
opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States
from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper
assistance, they never having been out of it. .

And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state;
and such important and sudden changes occur in the same
state; and, withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole
case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be
prescribed as to details and colatterals. Such exclusive,
and inflexible plan, would surely become a new
entanglement. Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.